The Medicalized Body
This piece was published in 2018 in the Anthology of Social Justice, Decolonization, and Intersectional Feminism
When I was eight years old, I started getting headaches. I would be playing in the sand at my grandparents’ cottage when the sun started to become painful, and I would need to go inside to lie down. After several months, my parents took me to the doctor, where I was told that they were tension headaches, caused by stress. I was given a set of exercises, and told to lighten up and relax.
When I was ten years old, I started experiencing pain in my joints. I was told, by physicians, that they were growing pains, and was called a drama queen.
When I was thirteen years old, I experienced abdominal pain so severe it brought me to the hospital emergency room. After a five-hour wait, I was told that all girls get cramps, and to stop being hysterical.
I knew that something bigger was happening within my body. I knew that my peers didn’t experience the same difficulty with basic physical functions. But I didn’t want to be the girl who cried wolf. I was well enough to push through, so I spent my time and energy marshalling my resources to sculpt myself into an undeniable entity. I earned the best grades in school, squashed any desire to rebel or push boundaries, and built myself a track record of steadfast reliability.
When I was eighteen years old, I experienced a headache that didn’t go away. It morphed into an all- encompassing weakness and fatigue that prevented my muscles from holding me up, my eyes from seeing, and my tongue from articulating words. The day had come where I could no longer function. Something was terribly, horrifically wrong.
I went to see a physician at my university’s health services centre and was referred to a massage therapist for stress, where I was asked about relationship troubles, difficulty making friends, and body image issues.
As time went on, my symptoms worsened and I found myself in front of an assembly line of disbelieving doctors. Everything that I had worked for seemed to melt away. Struggling to form words, alone at a hospital, I was unable to show them that I was educated or from a financially privileged background. I couldn’t convince them of my worth. All that they knew was that I was a young, fat, female, and their first instinct was to doubt my word.
Truthfully, their reaction didn’t surprise me. I had grown up learning that I needed to prove myself in order to receive respect from strangers. I was shocked, however, by how easily my family and friends seemed to shift their opinion of me. I had never been known to lie before, but with the slightest introduction of doubt, my word immediately lost its power, even with those who knew me best.
To me, intersectional feminism is a matter of life and death. Medicine has a long history of prioritizing white male experiences as the markers for diagnosis and treatment, but conditions often manifest differently in womxm, non binary and trans people, and people of colour.
Even in Canada, the ability to access healthcare in the first place is impacted by financial resources and social positioning. We need to urgently examine the social structures that shape our perceptions and experiences so that when somebody is unable to advocate for themselves, our instinct is to unreservedly value them.
It took four and a half years of my own research to finally learn that due to a connective tissue disorder my cervical spine was so unstable that my skull was shifting with every movement, slowly pushing my brain down into my spinal canal. It took hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a crowdfunding campaign to afford the surgeries and medical equipment that gave me back my life.
I am alive right now because I’m white, because my family had financial resources to spare, and I was able to understand medical jargon. This essay is made possible by my privilege.